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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Relationships
Challenge
Prove
Challenges
Modern
Interesting

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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton